Review – Jada Battle Machines 1:64 Scale Diecast Cars

I’m at GenCon and buried in work (which isn’t terrible, since work for me means playing games) but that’s having a serious effect on my productivity. Which means that battlegrip.com is suffering a little this week. I hope you guys understand.

That said, though, I just had to get these Jada Toys Battle Machines cars up on the site for you to enjoy. I shot the photos last weekend while I was at home and brought the cars with me to GenCon to play with in the evenings. (Even if my evenings have been spent gaming; last night I had a chance in the BattleTech game pods and it was awesome.)

With this review shorter than usual there will no doubt be questions. Please ask in the comments section and I’ll answer as I can.

Packaging

Pretty simple and straight forward, the Battle Machines are blister packed on cards and every card looks the same. The back of the card has a checklist for all 12 cars in the first wave. There’s nothing special or exciting here but you now know what to look for when you visit Wal-Mart or Target.

The Cars!

So what are Battle Machines and why did I grab them? These 1:64 scale diecast cars are auto combat cars that immediately remind me of how much I love the Car Wars game. Starting over twenty years ago I’ve loved the game and these mass market toy cars are perfectly matched to my vision of the cars in Car Wars. Big, mean, and ready for battle, these Battle Machines toy cars look so cool that I couldn’t resist hunting for them.

So far I’ve tracked down six of the twelve that have been released.

And I will find the other six.

How Are They As Toy Cars?

Not as nice as Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars, but definitely not the cheap junk you find in dollar stores, the Battle Machines cars are decent. They roll okay, feel nice and hefty, and have excellent style and paint.

The thing that makes these feel slightly inferior to Hot Wheels cars has to be the way these roll across the floor. They don’t have that glide effect that you get with Hot Wheels, but neither do they have that terrible “clunk clunk” feel that you get with cheap dollar store toy cars.

The paint is excellent, with most of the work looking like it was done by a machine of some sort. Neat, crisp, attractive graphics cover the cars (look at the photos, guys), and even the tiny Battle Machines logos that are printed on the cars are sharp.

I have absolutely no complaints with the paint job on these racers.

Durability

I did not give these toy cars a fair chance. I tossed all six cars in a ziplock bag, threw that in my suitcase, and then handed the suitcase to the airlines. Well, I’m paying for that now because the tiny plastic details on the cars are broken in places. The light rack on the orange Camaro is busted, a gun on one car bent a little, and overall they suffered damage on the trip.

Now these toys shouldn’t take that kind of stress during normal play, but if you treat these like I did my old toy cars when I was a kid — toss them all in a bucket and run out to play — they are gonna get beat up.

Be careful, guys! I know I will be from now on.

Closing Thoughts

I’ve got nothing. These look great, feel nice and heavy, and are honestly the first toy cars I’ve seen that just had to come home with me. Jada Toys did a great job with these and I am definitely going out to but the six that I do not own.

And I may even replace my orange Camaro, because that busted roof light is really starting to annoy me.

Philip Reed hopes that other toy makers don’t start releasing cars with guns or else he may find himself overwhelmed by tiny combat machines.